My first AR

Wikipedia describes the AR-15 rifle as “a lightweight, 5.56 mm, magazine-fed, semi-automatic rifle, with a rotating-lock bolt, actuated by direct impingement gas operation or long/short stroke piston operation”. Yesterday was my first hands on experience shooting one. This rifle in particular was one that I custom built on my own with lots of help from the internet and my local arms dealer, Ashby Arms.

No two parts on my rifle came from the same manufacturer and because of that, I jokingly named my rifle Frankenstein. All of my parts came from quality manufacturers; I just found it was easier and cheaper to find exactly which parts I needed wherever they were available. At the bottom of this post is a photo of the rifle and in a future post I’ll list all the parts and where I purchased them from.

It took me over 2 weeks to gather and fully assemble my rifle. Having built my first rifle, I now feel I could cut that time in half for a second build. The hardest part of the build was figuring out where to begin. Figuring out which parts I needed. Which parts came in which kit. Which parts were available. It took time. None of the reading I did in the weeks prior to my build helped prepare me much either (IMO there’s almost too much information online). It came down to just ordering stuff, waiting (lots of waiting), and seeing what came in.

In the end I was very pleased with my build. And best of all I learned an amazing amount about this type of rifle. I had a lot of fun doing it and I imagine I’ll have even more fun shooting it. Yesterday I was limited in my shooting as I have no sights whatsoever. I was simply shooting to make sure everything worked. I intend to buy some sort of scope/red-dot sight for it in the future, but for the time being I think I’ll take the red-dot off my Ruger Mini-14 and use that. Besides, I’m not talented enough to shoot BOTH rifles at the same time….yet

Wednesday, 9-26-12, 4:29pm
Final prep before test firing

** Please forgive my crappy picture. My phone usually does better than that but I had oil and dirt on my hands and was trying not to touch my screen more than I had to **